@thomasareed the days when even the absence of every pixel counted.

@wiert @thomasareed around 1990 I accidentally discovered I could scramble my video memory by running a screwdriver along the back of my video card, which meant I could watch how the screen got redrawn. (Before GPUs, so the CPU wrote to the video memory.) Watching Star Control, which was not new and ran in 320x200, redrawing the screen with minimal writes, so the background starfield traced at least a dozen lines through the static, I was impressed